It's easier to understand the rise of Hitler than the ascent of Trump

I recall the precise moment I learned how manipulating emotions is effective in ways logic can never be. In school, I used to be reasonably good at debates, quizzes and chess, a combination of talents that often clusters together. In my mind, all three were exercises in rationality. Of the dozens of competitions in which I participated, the rewards from which were certificates that would prove entirely useless, the one that sticks in my mind is a debate between current and past students of my school on the rather dry topic of whether calculating aids ought to be allowed in examinations. During the back and forth, one of the seniors made the point that using a calculator in an exam wouldn’t lead students to forget that two and two make four. I retorted, “In America, students are allowed to use calculators and they don’t know how to add two and two.” The entire audience clapped loudly, and even those on the opposing side smiled and applauded my quick rebuttal.

I had no idea what I was talking about. My only personal interaction with Americans had been with a couple of cousins who gave no indication of being arithmetically challenged. All I had to go on was random statements that had fallen upon my ears about Americans being stupid. The audience was no better informed than I, but agreed with me regardless. Nothing the seniors said after that intervention could turn the tide and my side won the debate handily.

I was taken aback by the affirmative response I’d received to an ignorant and, as I now know, inaccurate statement. The audience had been animated by an irrational feeling of superiority that countered a persistent, equally irrational inferiority complex. No analytical discourse could hope to address such a tangled mass of emotions and provide a similar payoff.

As a result of that experience, I understood early on how reactionaries exploited wedge issues to stir up emotions in ways that liberals found hard to counter. The most successful politician to do that in my neighbourhood was Bal Thackeray who in his quest for power targeted at different times Gujaratis, South Indians, Sikhs, and Muslims. Thackeray openly admired Hitler and reading up on the history of the first world war and its aftermath, I had no problem comprehending the dictator’s rise to power in Germany. And I wasn’t entirely surprised when Narendra Modi came to power. He was charismatic and ambitious, had a proven electoral track record in his home state, and faced a corrupt ruling party shackled to a dynasty that had produced a notably feeble-minded scion.

Waves of anger

What surprised me about that election, despite my awareness of the limitations of the Indian National Congress, was the sheer degree of anger towards a ruling party whose reign had produced a better record of economic growth and poverty reduction than any previous stretch in India’s independent (and, needless to say, colonial) history. A similar wave of anger was sweeping across the world, a global tsunami set off by the earthquake of the 2008 financial meltdown. The only effective response to that anger on the part of political leaders appeared to be authoritarianism and xenophobia. While the anger at the root of movements like the Tea Party in the United States had some rational causes, it seemed far in excess of the facts. Immeasurably greater episodes of immiseration had in the past produced less rage.

In describing the nature of contemporary anger, I’ve borrowed a phrase from TS Eliot, who described Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a man, “dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear”. It’s a slightly unfair description, considering that Hamlet’s father the king is murdered by his brother who then marries Hamlet’s mother, the queen. Most people would be fairly upset, were they in Hamlet’s position. When Eliot wrote about Hamlet, and for decades after, it was common to analyse the tragic hero’s state of mind and actions as expressions of the Oedipus complex. Like the inferiority complex I mentioned earlier, the Oedipus complex has its roots in psychoanalysis, a discipline that claims much of our behaviour is directed by the unconscious mind, where a host of urges reside that the conscious mind does not want to acknowledge and has repressed. In the psychoanalytic account, Hamlet continually postpones his revenge because his uncle has done what Hamlet himself unconsciously wants to do, which is to kill his father and marry his mother.

Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis are now unfashionable even in the humanities where they were banished after being scientifically discredited. What metaphor can we use today to describe a society whose anger is in excess of the facts? I have tried to explain the phenomenon in a past column as a failure of traditional perspective. We used to read newspapers, which frequently led with distressing events but always also had sports pages and comics and crosswords and dozens of mundane articles to balance things out, to provide perspective. On television news these days, discussion around a single event often takes up all of prime time across channels, leaving viewers with a distorted perspective. This analysis keeps the discussion within a broadly rational understanding of irrationalism.

Donald Trump’s rise defies any such categorisation. Watching him debate Hillary Clinton, I found, yet again, that my understanding of the exploitation of wedge issues and xenophobia, engendered by that school debate, fails to explain Trump. It can explain Thackeray, it can explain Modi, it can even explain Hitler, but not the clownish demagogue who is a step away from becoming the most powerful person in the world.

To call Trump’s debate performance a disaster is an understatement. A man with no ideas, no plans, no knowledge, and no comprehension of issues faced a thoroughly prepared veteran with a deeply considered, largely progressive agenda, and the difference between the two grew more apparent with each passing minute. Hillary Clinton, like all politicians, lies now and again, and bends the truth often. Unfortunately, you can’t win debates or elections without doing those things. She also has deep issues with transparency and trustworthiness, is an uninspiring speaker, and is compromised from having been in politics for a long time. But all this is the equivalent of saying, in analysing a batsman like Rahul Dravid, that he tended to hit straight at fielders too often and had trouble placing the ball for quick singles or piercing the field. Despite his obvious limitations, Dravid was one of the greatest batsmen India has produced. Imagine, now, a proposal to induct Aamir Khan into the Indian team in place of Dravid on the basis of the actor’s performance in Lagaan. That’s what the choice between Trump and Hillary is like.

Roots of rage

Barack Obama identified the roots of the rise of Trump when he said, in a much-derided speech during his 2008 campaign:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

Commentators noticed a resemblance between Obama’s words and a famous analysis by a German-Jewish philosopher whose ideas, like those of Sigmund Freud, find little purchase today (actually it’s only one phrase from a marvellous essay Karl Marx wrote at the age of twenty-five that has become well-known):

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx viewed faith as a coping mechanism, and used the metaphor of opium because of the drug’s analgesic properties. In the age of anger, we need the metaphor of a stimulant rather than an analgesic, perhaps an amphetamine would serve the purpose. The elimination of perspective by television news, the echo chamber of social networks, and the mask of anonymity offered by the web have combined to turn our political responses into something akin to a drug addict’s aggression. One might hope to reason with a bigot and find a sliver of common ground, but one cannot reason with a junkie.

It’s not only in the US that we find political responses that defy rational discourse. In as sense, ISIS is to other extremist Islamist organisations what Trump is to conservatism. Al Qaeda may be evil, but its evil is explicable within a rational framework. ISIS is like Al Qaeda with its mind addled by amphetamines.

Provided she doesn’t fall seriously ill again, and there are no major terrorist assaults in the US before election day, Hillary Clinton is likely to squeeze through to the presidency. The fact that Trump has come so close to victory, though, is already a defeat, and quite possibly a precursor to the rise of the extreme right to power in Europe, which in turn could trigger the demise of the European Union.